Whahahaa… nice. The EFF (electronic frontier foundation) has filed a request at the DMCA to allow jailbreaking of Apple’s iPhone. Users must be able to install any software they wish.. not just the software apple approves of.
Just this week apple removed any voice-based application from the App Store to protect their exclusive deal with AT&T because it “duplicates features that come with the iPhone”. This just proves the necessity of people having the right to install any software they want.
Soooo Apple had to respond to the DMCA why jailbreaking would be bad…. well.. hold on tight.. according to Apple the iPhone is not just a phone… it’s a weapon of mass-disruption. I call “FUD“

This morning I got a nice video from Jeroen in my mailbox, thanks a lot for that. The same video is available through YouTube. Crank up the sound and enjoy the sweet summer rain…

Wired.com has a nice (fictional) write-up on the shooting of the upcoming world of warcraft movie. The idea is that the extra’s in the movie are actual WoW-players… sooo… here’s what you get when you release a group of wow-players into the real world of movie shooting. Very recognizable (and funny).

There are extras goofing off everywhere, but it takes an hour of asking around to get a group of 10 of them together to shoot a scene. And then, just when we’re about to start filming, one of them suddenly has to leave because his mother needs him to clean his room or something.

Ach nee, niet uit de platenkoffer maar gewoon uit de kast met DVD’s maar daarom niet minder fraai. Ik weet niet meer hoe ik ooit bij B.B. King ben uitgekomen. Ik weet nog wel dat ik zijn muziek al prachtig vond voordat ik de man ooit had gezien. Inmiddels is B.B. 83 jaar en treedt nog steeds op..

Als je B.B. King ziet spelen en je let op zijn mimiek als hij speelt dan weet je dat hij op gevoel speelt… en dat is mooi… heel mooi:

Van de DVD “The Jazz Channel presents B.B. King”. Deze opname is gemaakt op 75 jarige leeftijd.

You may have noticed some downtime of the blog. This was due to a major system upgrade in which the entire system was recompiled against a new gcc/glibc combination.

After doing this and sifting to all changes in the configuration files apache failed to start… How nice. Segmentation faults all over the place. A little tweaking here and there solved the problem albeit a little later than expected… Anyway… back online.

As it became clear that the outage was going to take more time than expected I wrote a small sorry-server in perl that served the webpage displayed below:

You can use the code for your own purposes if you want to:
Code can be found here

I like this comic. Thanks for bringing this one to my attention, Sander.

Oh look at this. I saw this picture on digg. During a flight-show two boeings performed this very dangerous stunt. Emil Watson took the marvelous photographs. Great job!

Now this is actually a nice effort to do something new from the music scene. Today (20 july 2009) it is 40 years ago that Neil Armstrong & Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin set foot on the moon. To commemorate this event (and to earn a buck or two) David Bowie released tracks on the iTunes store. These contains the individual recording tracks from the “Space Oddity” song. So now you can make your own remix from these eight tracks. There is an application for the iPhone or you can use any other music editor (Garageband for example) to make your own mix…. I think this is a nice idea.
Want more acoustic guitar? Crank it up? Depending on your creativity you can even replace or add tracks in your own mix. Go creative… go wild… info here.

Demo of iPhone app

Tijdens een wandeling met wisselend weer moest ik denken aan het gedicht “Herinnering aan Holland” van Hendrik Marsman waarvan ik overigens alleen de eerste strofe echt uit het hoofd ken. Het sentiment werd opgeroepen door de prachtige wolken lucht en uiteraard het alom aanwezige water.

Meer foto’s

I told you… I haven’t been drinking. Pass me the breathalyzer and I will prove it…

Great joke when you are sober and pulled over for an alcohol-check.

Some people have too much time on their hands… thank the übernerd for that!
Only the background should be black and the ladders should be blue… but what I’m a nagging about? Great job!!

and there’s more classic games in LEGO

Oh my… who would have thought… Today I talked to a buddy at work and his voice sounded really bad… Bad as in “Tom Waits with a soar throat”-bad. Described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” Well no, it wasn’t that bad… it was worse… he sounded more like Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead.

So I just assumed he had been drinking more than Heineken can produce on one night. For a minute I thought of making a joke referring to his “grunting“-days… but with the weekend almost here I didn’t want to risk a serious beating… So I just let it be. Maybe he was coming down with a cold or something harmless…

So I checked his blog and I learned his old metalband is back together to record some demo’s of their best songs… He has been grunting after all!! On his blog he refers to his voice as sounding like Lemmy as well! I hope he doesn’t mind I link to the homepage of his band Hectic… ROCK ON!! I hope the demo’s will be made available when they are done.

Okay okay, calm down people…. calm down… This week rumours spread all over the internet that a 0-day attack against openSSH was used to compromise computer systems. Everyone was advised to upgrade to the latest version of openSSH even though there was not a single piece of evidence of this attack. Sure there was a nice (and somewhat entertaining) ‘script’ dump of an alledged attack (also read the small comments inside the script dump, very funny at times). In this dump you can see that they used a tool called 0penPWN (also called 0pen0wn) that alledgedly breaks openSSH. But I think we are all able to fake some output aren’t we? Here’s another dump of an alledged attack.

Damien Miller (openSSH) responded that he still has not gotten a single piece of evidence of a 0-day exploit. He summarizes some of the possible attacks and argues that its very unlikely that openSSH can be compromized in those ways. It seems that the actual hacks were brute-force password attacks that actually succeeded.

I protect my system against brute-force attacks by allowing only 5 failures from a single host. When 5 failures (like invalid usernames) are detected the host is blocked for 4 hours. It does have a whitelist of known hosts that I will never block. This is a simple script that is constantly monitoring messages from the ssh daemon. Oh and when I mean block I’m talking iptables so all packets are dropped and the attacker will be slowed down and the attack comes to a grinding halt. This approach works like a charm. When my server was just online I got around 10 to 20 attacks per day that lasted for hours. Now I only get a few per day which are automatically detected and killed at a very early stage.

Here’s an extract from the sshd logfile (some fields are blurred). Here you’ll see 5 errors from a specific IP (98.173.XXX.XXX) and that’s it. From there on packets are dropped from that IP address.

extract from sshd.log

Here’s an extract from the logfile of my script that shows what clients are blocked and unblocked. You will see that we block the attacker and around 4 hours later we re-enable it. When he’s still attacking he will be blocked for another 4 hours etc.

extract from the logfile of my script

Oh this is a dream come true: I finally got promoted. Where I work I’m part of a large department. To allow people to get acquainted they introduced a who-is-who directory where you can lookup people by name. There’s even a photograph for facial recognition.

After being urged to submit my information and photo by email I entered my information and included a photoshopped (actually “gimped”) photograph where I gave myself large dark alien eyes. Since I figured my submission would be rejected anyway I entered my function to be “SME / Technical Theo”. To my big surprise the entry was copied verbatim into the directory including the photo. So now it’s official: I’m a Technical Theo at last… and an alien. Now I wish I’d put down “MacGyver” as function…

Yesterday Google officially announced Chrome OS, an operating system targetted netbooks (both intel x86 & arm-based). Chrome OS will be built on the linux kernel. Google will reimplement the security architecture of Linux. A new minimal graphical interface will provide an easy to use interface. As google says it: “it should just work”.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Here’s the full announcement. You want screenshots don’t you?